A transaction entity is any person or any device, such as a payment card like a credit card or debit card, or such as a mobile computing device, that can execute a transaction. A transaction entity also can include autonomous systems such as client or server computers or network devices that are monitored for abnormality.
In conventional transaction device fraud detection systems, false positives, i.e., a designation of a transaction as being fraudulent when in fact it is not, are a necessary byproduct of successful fraud detection. It is understood that false positives can be reduced but at the expense of reduced fraud detection. While false positives are a concern, it is unnecessary false positives that are of most concern to users of such transaction device fraud detection systems.
One shortcoming of payment card fraud detection systems occurs when a model gives a high score (indicating a high risk of fraud) to a transaction that is very similar to a non-fraud transaction previously completed by a cardholder. The problem is especially acute in cases in which a card is transacting according to the same transaction characteristics, e.g., the same merchant and at the same location, as before. In many cases, the payment card fraud detection system card profile does not have a full transaction history of earlier transactions under such identical transaction characteristics due to the real-time or near-real time processing requirements of many detection systems such as payment card fraud, customer identity take-over, or network monitoring of computers/switches connected to a network.